Past years have witnessed exponential growth of network users in the world. For example, global Long-Term Evolution (LTE) subscribers reached a total of 2.1 billion by the first quarter of 2017. Such staggering growth in the number of subscribers drives network traffic to rise quickly. Global mobile data traffic grew 63% in 2016, reaching 7.2 exabytes per month at the end of 2016, up from 4.4 exabytes per month at the end of 2015. Mobile data traffic in the world grew 180-fold over the past 5 years.
The snowballing effect of the mobile traffic growth has overwhelmed different data and voice networks. Data tsunami and signaling storms have been swamping these networks, and challenging existing cellular technologies. The traffic is still growing, along with users' demands on network performance.
For network service providers, the continued mobile traffic growth means the continued expansion of network capacity and the optimization of network performance so as to maintain the quality of service (e.g., throughput and latency) at an optimal level that is perceivable by users. Steps need to be taken in order to prepare the networks and business operations for the challenges of upcoming technology, such as 5G networks and Internet-of-things.